God’s Own Country, no more? Kerala's 'supari' goons spread their tentacles

“Police nabs quotation girl” said the headline of a crime report in Deccan Chronicle on 18 January. The news story from the hilly Pathanamthitta district in southern Kerala went like this: “A 20-year-old girl who plotted a brutal attack on a youth in Ranni with three others, was arrested by the police on Tuesday, more than five months after the incident.” Local editions of other English newspapers, a dozen Malayalam news papers and an equal number of TV channels went to town with this story of a third year undergraduate student, Mitra Susan Abraham, joining hands with Kerala’s home-grown criminal syndicates called “quotation gangs”. In custody now, she has defended herself saying that she was trapped by her college-mates who planned and executed the attack. Mitra’s arrest is significant in Kerala on two counts: one for the recent trend of girls getting associated with criminal gangs, and the second, local youth, many of them college students, forming criminal syndicates called “quotation gangs”. A third feature of the crime scene, sometime associated with the “quotation gangs,” is the endemic sex-trafficking of under-aged girls. First let’s look at the case of Mitra and the girls in crime. In the past, Mitra’s story could have aroused considerable shock and disdain in conservative Kerala, particularly given her “respectable” family background. Not any more. She is the third girl who has been arrested for her association with “quotation gangs” in recent months. Many other girls have also been arrested for cheating and white collar crimes such as defrauding banks in connivance with organised gangs, but they don’t appear menacing in terms of sheer cold-blooded criminality. [caption id=“attachment_188553” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Kerala — known as ‘God’s own country’ — is increasingly being associated with ‘quotation gangs’. Kerala Tourism”]  [/caption] The first girl to grab the headlines for crime turned out to be Kerala’s first inter-state woman mafia don — Sobha John. She came into limelight while attempting to trap a priest of the famed Sabarimala temple in a sex scandal in Kochi. Her accomplices were men who had their hands both in crime and “business”. She then disappeared from the state and was arrested recently in Bangalore in a sex-trafficking case in which she allegedly pimped an under-aged Kerala girl to about 100 clients. When she was brought to a local police station in the state in connection with the case, she breached the police cordon around her and threatened to expose many high and mighty. A wiry woman from southern Kerala, she had a regular gang of hirelings around her and used to move around in an Indian SUV managing her syndicate spread across different portfolios. The second one who shocked the state for her dangerous liaisons with criminals was Sherin in Alappuzha district who allegedly plotted and murdered her US-returned father-in-law. She conspired with three other boys over a few days and got him killed. The motive was to get hold of his wealth. She didn’t care for the fact that the old man doted on her. She is in jail now serving a life sentence. The third was Mitra. Mitra’s case is interesting because she is a college student, the youngest of the three mentioned here and claims that she thought the plot that landed her in trouble was in fact a silly prank that her friends played on another friend. However, the police charge that she was the key to laying the trap for a brutal attack on the youth. While all the other boys were arrested soon after the attack, Mitra evaded the police for five months. In between, there are also regular reports of innocuous young girls siphoning of large quantities of money from banks and financial establishments or getting involved in cheating. Interestingly, a vamp played by a young girl in a local TV-soap is hugely popular in the state. Is crime among women getting cool? Too soon to say. Now let’s look at the “quotation gangs”. “Quotation gangs” are the local equivalent of “supari” gangs in Mumbai. Just as the way one gives a “supari” in Mumbai, in Kerala, those who hire their services give them a “quotation”. They are mostly in their twenties and roam around on motorbikes or ill-maintained Indian SUVs. They are ferociously protective of their territories, fight on the streets, and operate 24/7. The state is now teeming with them. The scion of a leading business family in the state was killed by one of the quotation gangs. The Kerala police recently said that many such “quotation gangs” sub-contract their “quotation” to college students. The cover of a student as well as the protective environs of college make crimes committed by them hard to trace. “Quotation gangs” have become such a big criminal menace in Kerala, that on assuming office the new chief minister vowed to eradicate them. Both the ruling and the opposition parties accuse each other of patronising such gangs. There is no disputing the fact that political parties, and sometimes even the police, patronise such gangs. A recent case in which a senior police officer in the southern district of Kollam employed a quotation gang to kill an inconvenient journalist exposed the nexus between such criminals and people of influence in the state. A notorious young criminal in the state capital, who is in jail under the Goonda’s Act now, was closely linked to the son of a minister. Why the word “quotation”? Probably because that is the common word in Kerala for undertaking petty contracts. Just the way they use “purchasing” for routine “shopping”. And matters related to the flesh? The state has become endemic to sex-trafficking of under-aged girls for more than a decade now. All the cases have a similar pattern: the girl is promised love or a serial/film role and is trafficked, then she is pimped to countless men at several locations in the state and other states till the racket breaks open on its on. The police and the media then start the hunt for the people who sexually exploited her. Most of the time, the case reaches nowhere and just fades away from public memory until another case comes up. Politicians, actors, government officials, businessmen and men from all walks of life get involved and get arrested too. Almost all the cases of trafficking have a woman in a kingpin role. The moral rot in the state — which brands itself as “God’s own country” and was on the verge of commissioning Amitabh Bachchan to market it — has reached its head. This has been a steady decadence that many conveniently chose to ignore. The state — run largely on remittances ($10 billion or Rs. 50,000 crore a year) — is among the most consumerist and least enterprising. The exceptions being for money chains, serial marketing and deposit-frauds. There is hardly any industry, agriculture or wealth generation as seen in the neighbouring states of Karnataka or Tamil Nadu. Higher education is in a shambles with more than 80 percent who enroll into the state’s mushrooming self financing engineering colleges not passing out. Those benefitting directly from remittances or allied service industries manage a decent lifestyle while aspiring for more. Others, without any means or interest in hard work, simply aspire for a lavish lifestyle and often land in organised crime while leaving the Rs 500 a day jobs to poor Bengali or Odiya migrants.